


In Quiet Rooms

by Wander (yoimwander)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Drama, Enemies to Friends, Eventual Fluff, Existential Crisis, M/M, People Change People, Post-Canon, and even if the thing you had before wasn't the best, but hey at least you have a pet millipede, it was still the best for you, it's like you try to move on but every new thing tastes like ash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:53:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28567254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yoimwander/pseuds/Wander
Summary: Two years after the disaster on Chorus, Locus is a new man with a new life. But ghosts of the past have trouble staying buried.Or, Felix didn't die and shows up on the doorstep of a man he really doesn't recognize.
Relationships: Felix | Isaac Gates/Locus | Samuel Ortez
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	In Quiet Rooms

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is just a little idea. Not sure how far it's gonna go, but there will definitely be a second part. After Season 13, Locus just leaves. Ignore the "redemption" arc of later seasons. He's still trying to figure out how to be a person, alright? Give him some time. Capella exists in Halo canon. Do I know what it looks like? Nah. Took lots of liberties here.
> 
> Hope you like it!

A deed is performed—bold, courageous, embarrassing—and the people start calling you by a name.  
— Dr. Spirit of Night Eagle Curtis

* * *

They don't know him here.

On the first of every month, well before the sun squints shyly above the most distant edge of a ragged peak, he loads the carbon fiber trammel net into a large drift boat and checks the solar level on its rear engine. If the small LED screen mounted on top indicates a charge of 70% or higher, he prepares simply: long dark hair tied into a loose bun, to keep it out of his hands while he works.

Geiss and Walker show up shortly after these preparations and call him by a name that is not his own. They smile when they say it. He answers with a nod.

They load up in the drifter and set out into the wide, warm ocean. The sky wakes from its early morning blue-grey and yawns pastel shades of yellow and pink as they skip along the waves. No clouds. In an hour, he cuts the engine and the boat rocks temperamentally on the edge of a dark spot in otherwise flat, teal waters. The swirling eddy, swayed to motion by cold pulled upward from a deep underwater ravine, twinkles seafoam green.

Color, color, color.

Two years with these people, and still he marvels.

They lay the trammel net out in a line and grab long metal paddles concave on the end, scooping spoonfuls of vibrant phytoplankton into fine mesh. This quiet gathering of tiny organisms nibbling on nutrients pulled from the ocean's depths is only the first step of the process. When they return to the colony, they pass on laden nets to Auri at the lab who clones the unique genetic footprint of these piles of phytoplankton, and separates them into sealed, oxygenated containers heavy with salt water. Green for the original, pure organisms. Orange for those cloned creatures with weaker DNA.

When he first joined the colonist's efforts to farm and sell sustainable oxygen, he had nearly laughed at the color of these bins.

Geiss carries the orange container back to the drift boat. His overly tan arms strain with the weight of it. They set out to the same eddy and by the time the sun has set and the ocean smells as dark as it looks, they upturn the bin of cloned phytoplankton back into the sea and stick around just long enough to watch these newly birthed organisms stumble in confused emerald patterns while cold water opens her arms to embrace the reflection of a stolen child.

It is not good for this planet to do these things. But Capella drifts around a lonely star in the Outer Colonies, beneath the thumb of a disinterested human government precisely 42.2 light-years away, and its fate has never mattered. They will continue to farm this land's resources because they are told that is all they are good for.

This is what it is, he thinks, to be caught and cut and brought down to your basest form. To be made anew and dumped into the patient clutch of an unfamiliar cold, ravenous for scraps to sustain your slippery code.

To return to eddies.

* * *

At the bar, he endures the story again.

Grey eyes watch moving mouths. The particular lines and curves they form, precise words in sloppy accents, that can only approximate meaning. He finds more use in their body language. Walker with a fifth shot of vodka knocked back and pulled down his tightly swallowing throat, blonde stubble barely noticeable from neck to jaw. How Geiss tips the other man's chair back from its precarious two-legged lean and Walker fumbles with the idea of balance before righting himself with a glare. Geiss, baked by the sun, whose skin resembles burned caramel, laughs louder than he usually might if he was sober.

Beyond them, the window. In many ways more fascinating than the men. He tracks movement from left to right like a biologist in the field with a mental notebook. First, a red-winged garble, bat-like but small, its air sacks puffing from its chest. Mating ritual. A female garble has translucent wings. Much harder to spot. He sees her hiding in a bush, head cocked, judging the size of the male's expanded chest and thus his flight range. Next, a thin pale woman teeters on the seat of a hover scooter. Her cropped hair, long at the top and buzzed on the sides, flies away from her in messy strands. Brown. An uninteresting shade. A tilt graces her closed mouth that reminds him of—

No.

"He's zoning out again, ain't he?"

Geiss refrains from touch only because his green eyes hold a point fine enough to poke for him.

"Anyways," the dark skinned man continues, waving a shaker glass in his hand that sloshes amber drops onto the laminated wooden table when he gestures with it. Geiss speaks to Walker, new in town, fresh-faced and eager for honest work, but plants a friendly, tipsy gaze on stormcloud eyes.

"Sil here showed up in the middle of monsoon season. More stiff-backed than any rookie colonist you ever did seen. By the grace a God, too."

Here, a hand reaches out to pat him on the arm. It pauses before contact. Respect. Understanding. Two strong emotions that pass through a green lens like light through a Heineken bottle. Geiss pulls tentative fingers back to himself and continues.

"Guy comes lumberin outta the jungle with a ripped up shirt and mud caked over that scar like he spent the whole evenin kissin Capella. Shit was hilarious. No offense."

Geiss winks and Sil—they call him by a name that is not his own—quirks a bushy eyebrow.

"So we're tryin'a moor the drifters in a howl wind, right? Feels like the whole planet's shakin apart, and enters, stage left—"

"Last time," Sil interrupts, taking a sip of his dark lager, "it was stage right, wasn't it?"

This is something he's been working on. Planting himself in the moment rather than painting his mind with the facts of the world around him in an attempt to tuck away a persistent ghost.

He is often rewarded for these efforts. Geiss grins broadly, shaking his head in that good-natured way of his. Opens him to the conversation, and Sil talks, softly and not very often, and drinks, and that hole inside him never fills, and becoming a person among people never gets easier.

At home, when Capella's first moon intersects beyond the second and the night is at its brightest, he steps onto the front porch of his beach side cabin with empty hands and a scrubbed red face. The ocean reaches for the shore like spilled inkwells dripping their black stain on the surface of a smooth canvas. Retracts, as in afterthought. _No,_ it says to him. _No, I've changed my mind._

He wonders, at times, what could have happened with a change of mind.

With a _no._

With a _stop._

With a _we are people, not ink confined to glass, begging to spill, to stain._

We are people.

* * *

A bitterness taints the aftertaste of being the last person alive who knows your name. It only grows sharper the more he tries to forget it. _Blank,_ he tells himself. _White noise, static._ That is his name. That has always been his name.

It never works, but he tries, and that counts for something.

At the beginning of the month, Sil collects phytoplankton and receives a paycheck shortly after. Half spent on the mortgage, one quarter on food, and one quarter on Capella's rye grain vodka, which he does not prefer, but it's there, and good quality, and cheap due to abundance.

He isn't an alcoholic. An alcoholic is unaware they have a problem.

On an Outer Colony planet, certain amenities plentiful on civilizations closer to Earth simply do not exist. Substitutions are made.

For coffee, a shrubby stout tree transplanted from Earth to many of its Inner Colonies, and too valuable to risk lengthy transport, there is kiplow. The dark navy leaves of a kiplow plant smell like fruity leather. When steeped, the caffeinated tea settles in shades of light blue and tastes bitter. Best served with honey and cream.

For a lack of dogs or cats, one might consider the jumperlion. It does not resemble a dog, cat, or a lion for that matter, but rather a large millipede with a hard carapace, about three feet long in adulthood and as thick as a corgi. It does, as the name suggests, jump. Quite high and quite far. Its lumbering body scrunches tight like an accordian, then springs outward for a powerful leap. Its temperament is often likened to the loyalty of a labrador, with the intelligence of a high schooler. A broody one.

For therapy, vodka. On the more temperate northern hemisphere, fields of wheat and grain occupy large landmasses. Fermented and distilled, high quality vodka is shipped around the globe and off planet. Drink enough, the colonists say, and a plump little lady with white hair will appear before you, notepad in hand, and nod as you explain the woes that trouble you. Sil tries this method every night, though the lady is not the one who appears.

For romance in an unsure life filled with dangerous labor, unexpected off-planet transfers, and lawless marauders, he finds the blinking light of an ember meandering listlessly down his dim shore.

Mov liked him from the start, and that is perhaps why he liked her eventually.

Standing from his porch with eyes cast on the half-moon inlet encircling his home, he had spotted that flared point of red light before the body attached to it. Mov, with soft skin darker than chocolate, and a cigarette hanging out her mouth. He watched, patiently, while she made a midnight circuit from one side of the inlet to the next, and back again. Night after night, until eventually she had turned, walked to the base of creaky wooden steps leading up to the entrance of a cabin on stilts, and said, "So, you gonna say hi or what?"

One last drag on the cigarette, burning it to its filter. She flicked the butt into the sand by her feet. Hair like a black brush. Arms long and shaded like topsoil dug up and left in a pile beneath a tree. Impossible blue eyes, bright and secretive. She resembled nothing of the lingering traits stuck in his head, so she was perfect.

They come together, and part, and come together again. She dissipates in the morning like so much mist, but while he has her, and his head cocks with liquor, and the X on his face scrunches with smiles and reluctant laughter, he enjoys her.

"I heard a rumour the other day that your full name is _Siltwood._ "

He hums an affirmative while sturdy nails trace lines down his bare abdomen. Her fingers pause. Her mouth contorts in a way that holds his attention more readily than the wide window just over her shoulder. A miasma of concealed amusement threatens to display itself on the curve of plump lips. She resists. Instead presses her naked body against his beneath the sheet and buries her face against his shoulder to hide her smile.

"That can't be right. That's not a name, that's a _tree._ "

The siltwood, native to Capella, remains one of the planet's most botanically interesting features. Chemically, it can be called half wood and half crystal. Rises from arid canyons like a stalagmite, though it begins as a seed and not a collection of minerals slowly piled one atop the other. Siltwood saplings start as rough, granular trunks that poke through the earth like tan teeth. As they mature into adulthood, the stone wood hardens further until it crystalizes into a clear, quartz-like material. After this transformation, thin, nearly translucent green leaves bloom from its sprawling branches.

Mov shakes her head, giggling, and Sil chooses not to explain his name because he knows she won't mind.

She leaves the planet months later, and he is alone again, and the vacant space inside him she never quite filled grows a little deeper.

* * *

In the jungle just beyond his home, the jumperlion sleeps. Solitary creatures seek shade and quiet places, so it curls beneath the overhang of a large boulder and he rests his back against the thick trunk of a gnarled tree, and they watch each other from a great distance. Its many legs flex and twitch beneath its tough casing. Sil stretches his fingers outward until they ache before pulling them back into a loose fist.

A pet is not the sort of thing that fits the shape of the old hole carved deep in his chest, but could cover some lonely stretch of it.

He reads up. Jumperlions prefer starchy vegetables, so on his next trip to the market he buys corn and yams and sweet potatoes. When the skittering creature is not occupying its favorite hide, he leaves a sampling of these vegetables beneath the rock, and when he returns, either the next day or the one after that, the vegetables are gone and the jumperlion leaves no other trace of its presence.

After a week passes and he does not see it again, he decides to name it Galisdi, after the lichen it nests in.

Galisdi remains shy, but he remains persistent. An offering of yellow corn one night, steamed sweet potatoes the next. Yams are more expensive, so he saves these as treats. None of these foods emulate the jumperlion's natural diet. Yet each night he offers, the jumperlion takes.

He has another nightly ritual, nested in soft blankets strewn along his couch. A bottle of Capella vodka on his squat wooden coffee table. A small glass beside it. Ten times the cold rim of the glass meets his lips. Ten times his head tips back and his throat opens up and the warmth in his belly grows until it pulls up past his chest, his shoulders, his neck, and he relaxes fully and deeply, sitting alone in the dark with nothing but the sound of the waves and his own quiet voice speaking to a ghost that isn't there. Sometimes it's eleven, or only eight, or the whole bottle disappears and he stumbles out onto his dark beach and lumbers five kilometers into town to grab another bottle, drinking it from the neck on the slow amble back.

Therapy.

At the first of the month, he gathers phytoplankton into carbon fiber trammel nets. Geiss tells stories at the bar. He feeds the jumperlion. He drinks.

At the first of the month, he gathers phytoplankton into fine meshed carbon fiber trammel nets and marvels at the colors in the sky. Geiss tells stories at the bar and he listens, and talks sometimes, and feels no closer for it. He feeds Galisdi and it does not show its face. He drinks, and stares at the jittery silhouette of a man he knows no longer exists, and wakes up on the sofa sweating and cold.

At the first of the month, he gathers phytoplankton into fine meshed carbon fiber trammel nets with large concave metal spoons and wonders on what permanent damage he could cause to his eyes if he stares long enough at the sun. Geiss laughs and sloshes a shaker glass and sings karaoke at the bar, loudly and mostly in tune, and he cannot share his own stories because then they would _know,_ and he feels no closer to becoming a person. He leaves sacrificial vegetables on Galisdi's altar and it remains a creature of solitude and must think he's much the same. He drinks an entire bottle of Capella vodka and the man who haunts him meets him on the road back from town, frowning, the judgmental squint to brown eyes blurry but more present than most nights, and he passes out on the sofa, sweating, and wakes up with a pounding headache, a mouthful of cotton, and a well-known voice ringing clearly through the air:

"Hey, Locus."

Confused, he startles awake and sits upright. Peels open heavy eyelids to catch a glimpse of a familiar man standing in the room. Vertigo roars through his hungover head and he slams his eyes shut again, flopping back down onto the couch with arms spread wide to regain balance.

"Wow, Loc. Never took you for a sloppy drunk before, but I guess you're just full of surprises, huh?"

No.

His eyes remain firmly closed. Morning sunlight from the open blinds shines down on his face and turns the inside of his lids a fleshy orange. Not yet. It's too soon. He's done everything he could think of to stave off a mental break. Kept a job. Socialized. Preoccupied his time with caring (if minimally) for another living thing. Made sure to dampen the volume of his thoughts with liquor and heat in his throat.

He takes a deep breath that hitches uncomfortably in his lungs.

Opens his eyes.

Felix stands on the other side of the coffee table, dressed in jeans and a thin, brown shirt, long sleeves folded up to his elbows. Arms crossed over his chest. He points a disapproving eyebrow downward.

Sil—Locus—Sam has finally snapped.

He stares at a mouth on a body that should not be alive as lips form vowels and consonants into syllables and words and string them together and—oh, the hallucination is talking to him.

"Okay, so, first off? You're not crazy. I mean, you _are,_ you're fuckin batshit insane let's be honest, but right here, right now? Not crazy."

Felix unravels one hand to point at himself, tapping a thin finger against his own chest. His shirt dimples beneath the touch.

"I'm alive."

He doesn't smile, as if reading the pulse of the room and knowing this isn't exactly good news, but something smug creeps into his tone that Locus identifies immediately: a victory, of sorts. As small as it is.

Locus swallows. His throat bobs. He stares for a very long time, lingering on the edges outlining a body that should not be here—that _cannot_ be here.

Felix shifts his weight from one leg to the other. Rocks on the balls of his feet. Seems to lose what limited amount of patience a figment of Locus' imagination can even have, before completely unfurling his arms and gesturing casually. He paces when he talks, and Locus follows the short path from one corner of the room to the next, taking note of the coffee table still kept safely between them.

"So, uh. Yeah. How are the kids? God, I hope you haven't actually reproduced. One of you in any universe is enough, thanks. Christ, I bet your spawn would look like fuckin Easter Island heads with little twig bodies. Which actually might be funny enough to justify the whole having kids thing, but, no, no, one of you is enough. _More than,_ if you ask me."

Felix freezes mid wave. He turns, palms forward and held out in Locus' direction as if to placate a wild animal.

"Okay that sounded way more threatening than I—" Cuts himself off with a shake of his head. Fingers fly to the bridge of his nose.

Felix paces again and Locus is not mentally ready and far too hungover to deal with this psychotic breakdown he's apparently having. It's one thing to imagine a silhouette, a dark spot, to recall the memory of a grin, wide and hungry and rogue with misplaced power, or hear a voice snarling ragged words, _you can die with the rest of them._ It's another thing entirely to see the picture perfect image of a living body in front of him, and all the evidence of change. Muscles thinner, hair long enough on top to pull back into a stubby bun, a pale scar drawn over the right side of a constantly moving mouth, and another one, longer, following the line of his jaw from ear to chin.

Ghosts don't change.

But at the same time, dead men don't walk.

"Yoohoo, Locus?"

Fingers snap, not breaking the silence in the room (as there had not been any to begin with) but altering its cadence.

"Hey, Ortez, you with me here? Cause I got exactly zero sleep last night on that shitty lump of springs you call a bed, and I'm too fucking exhausted to explain this twice, alright? So—"

"You are not real."

When Locus speaks, the act of finding his voice a shaky one to begin with, it comes out not with conviction, but with necessity. Felix cannot be alive. He needs Felix to not be alive. Every wall he's built around his soul to steady himself after Chorus, was laid brick by brick with the mortar of Felix's death. That had been Locus' beginning. His primordial ocean brimming with DNA. He laid to rest old parts of himself that day and crawled to shore as a new beast. He's still evolving legs. If Felix is not dead, then the mortar washes away and all those carefully placed bricks become unsteady stacks swaying in harsh winds, threatening to topple over and bury him, a small and struggling organism, beneath their crushing weight.

Felix _cannot_ be alive.

Felix looks at him with a scrunched face. Stops in that steady stride from point A to point B in Locus' small living room, and cocks his head to the side. A long pause stretches between them. Heavy and contemplative.

"Please don't tell me I have to pinch you."

Locus flings off the wrinkly blanket wrapped around his legs and swings his bare feet onto the hardwood floor. Barely notices the long, pointed step backwards Felix takes. One hand grips the arm of the couch to keep himself upright. His fingers tremble. Every prickling instinct within his body screams at him to keep all attention locked on the other man in the room, but bright beams of yellow sunlight claw through open blinds and they dig into the mush of his brain, eager to pick it apart. A pounding headache threatens to make him spill last night's dinner onto the table. Roasted sweet corn and baked artichokes. It wouldn't be pretty. He closes his eyes again. Plants an elbow on his knee. Hunches low enough to lay his head into an open palm, where dark fingers curl and dig into his scalp.

"You are not real," he says again, and doesn't look up. Not when the silence in the room grows dense and transforms into a stifling weight. Not when a breath stutters in his throat and sticks there, worse than a hand around his trachea, squeezing from the inside. Not when the subtle press of light steps muffled against the floor gets closer. Why are they muffled? Locus hadn't looked long enough at his hallucination to take in fine details like that. Muted footprints suggest a fabric dampener. Socks. A scent takes up residence in his mind when steps stop. Oil and ozone, nearly hidden beneath the harsh salt and crisp watery smell of the ocean outside.

"Look at me."

He doesn't.

"Locus, just look at me, okay? Jesus Christ you don't have to be so fucking melodramatic about it."

Still, he doesn't look.

A deep quiet, as heavy as it had felt moments ago, does not remain so the longer it lingers. Quiet as a concept exists only in the vacuum of space, and even then one would experience it for, at best, fifteen seconds. Under such a lethal drop in pressure, air and gas trapped in the body expands, and water begins to dissolve, vying for an escape. This traitorous act of dissolution forms air bubbles in sluggish veins, blocking essential circulation. Cut off from necessary oxygen, the brain simply blacks out. Fifteen seconds of conscious silence. After, while drifting listlessly in zero-G, the body bloats as gas and water and air cry for freedom. Within ninety seconds, a more permanent silence follows.

But here, on Capella, there is noise.

The subtle hiss of waves inhaling and exhaling along the beach. A tittering garble spreading leathery wings to express his fondness for his mate. The rustle of large, waxy jungle leaves swaying on the wind. Sounds that drift through the window Locus had wrenched open last night, too hot, before trekking into town for another bottle of vodka. When he strains, he can pretend not to hear the way another person breathes in the room. Or that put upon sigh.

He cannot, however, ignore the sudden, loud _thunk_ of sharp metal slammed into the wooden coffee table right in front of him, or how the noise startles his body into jerking upright, eyelids flying open to seek out the source of the noise.

Felix straightens up slowly. Some incomprehensible look flashes through his eyes. Fierce. Considering. He leaves his pointed bayonet embedded in the table between them, black handle still quivering from the force of the stab.

"I came here to kill you, y'know." Felix cocks his head. Leans his weight on one leg, hip jutting out so slightly with the pose. Haughty. "But holy shit you look so pathetic I just might have to change my mind."

Locus looks at him. Really looks at him. New clothes. New haircut. New scars. The way his chest expands and collapses with each breath. The smell of him in the room. A soft ray of sunlight hits his leg, adding color and dimension to the fabric of dark wash jeans.

"How?"

If the hallucination has a convincing reason for its existence, he might consider options that do not contain the very likely reality that the person standing before him is a figment of his imagination. A fault line in the deepest, most essential parts of his brain.

Felix scoffs, both eyebrows rising up toward his hairline.

"With the knife, you idiot. I would kill you with the knife."

Locus turns his attention to the bayonet lodged deeply in his coffee table. It would take a strong and pointed yank to pull it from the wood, and by that time he would be on his feet, hand around a throat that would certainly dissipate the moment he tried to touch it.

He doesn't want to try, the knowledge of this transience unsettling.

Locus shakes his head.

"No. How are you _here?_ " His voice fractures at the end. His head never stops in its attempt to burst open from the inside. His mouth tastes like stale liquor and feels like cotton.

Felix starts to pace again, slower, like a carnivore eyeing a meal and testing small shifts in the air to ensure it stays downwind. A pink tongue slips out briefly to wet a lower lip. A strange look takes hold of his expression. Giddy, yet hesitant. The bright eyes of someone who has prepared a speech—a long one—buried beneath the unhappy twist of lips that might imply they've forgotten its contents. Or maybe the topic sentence changed.

"Well," Felix begins, pinning Locus to the couch with an intense look. "That depends on what you mean by _here._ In your house? Easy explanation, but god you're not gonna like the answer, which kinda makes me want to explain it in _great detail_ just to see the look on your face. I'm betting, hmm—" Taps a finger against his chin. "—embarrassed. _Mortified._ Shit's gonna be gold, and, oh, don't you worry that crazy little head of yours, we'll get to that. Eventually. But do you mean _here,_ in town? Or on this dogshit planet? Or—"

"Felix."

In his meandering stroll, Felix approaches the far wall. Slams the flat of his palm against sheetrock painted a dull cream. An unnecessary jolt of noise in the air between them. His shoulders heave up and down with his back turned for just a moment, before the man spins on his heel, mouth a wild slant, baring teeth.

Locus watches from his straight-backed position on the couch, that prickling sensation of threat raising the hair on the back of his neck.

"I'll tell you how," Felix says, with rabid amusement in his tone, "when you tell me _why._ "

Crouched so slightly, Felix sucks in a measured breath while he straightens. Pinches at the long sleeves of his shirt to adjust the cuff on either arm. His hair, still buzzed on the sides but now long enough on top for him to arrange excess locks into a loose, short bun, slips delicately from a black hair tie. Both hands rise to tug and pull, tucking errant strands back into place. Composes himself. Shiny eyes a soft mocha brown flick upward soon after, and the sordid impression of a train derailed wipes itself from his expression. Calm again. The new scar on his lip pulls when he smiles.

Locus stares at it.

"Honestly, what part of _I came here to kill you_ don't you understand? I'm clearly doing you a favor right now." A laugh, light, forced, full of mock amusement. He opens his mouth as if to clarify what that favor could be, but ends up only shaking his head. "I mean, you were just so _pitiful_ last night. Lucky for you at least one person in the room knows how to not stab someone in the back, huh?"

"You are _not_ —"

Felix strides quickly around the rectangular table, avoiding a sharp edge, before halting stiffly directly in front of Locus' hunched form. He stands like a monolith. Imposing despite the narrow shoulders and thin, cinched waist. Or, no, not imposing. Frozen.

Locus peers up at his hallucination and attempts to pick apart the peculiar tilt to what usually is ( _was_ ) a coy and sharp mouth. Jaw clenched. Eyes that flash in such a way that, long ago, used to predicate a curled fist slamming into soft flesh—cheeks, maybe, or a vulnerable solar plexus. _How am I supposed to read that broken fucking brain of yours._ Now, there is no fist. Only thoughtfully twisted lips and hesitation.

A rough hand clenches around his bicep. Flesh touches flesh. Locus sucks in a sharp breath and finds the chill that had frozen Felix now falls like condensation on a sweaty glass, trickling into his own veins. Drip after drip. He can't move. The air inflating his lungs sticks there. Thin, pale fingers curl against his skin. Cold. The atmosphere outside is balmy, tropical, but Felix has always had poor circulation. Appendages susceptible to loss in frigid environments.

Locus had offered his gloves once, on a mission in the wilds of an ice planet, their target a paranoid man dodging his bounty in pure isolation. Felix, who had forgotten his own pair of gloves, turned his nose up, smacked them out of Locus' extended hand, and shoved blue-tinged fingers deep in the pockets of his jacket. _Big hands like yours? They'll mess with my aim, but I guess you didn't think about that one, huh? So fuckin soft, you big idiot. Keep your head in the game._ Crouching, Locus had picked up black gloves from snow packed ground, dusted powder from their fingers, and stared at the length of the fabric, lamb's skin on the outside with a cashmere lining. They'd been a gift. He stuffed them into his own jacket pocket, bare-handed, before trailing after the man who had gifted them.

Now, a cold hand grips his upper arm tightly, an inch below the white sleeve of his simple tee, and Locus drags a wildly confused gaze at the spot where bruising fingers sink into skin. It is not a phantom touch. It is not hair raised on the nape of his neck due to the nagging impression of eyes turned on him. It is there, present, and uncomfortably real.

He jerks away once these thoughts sink in, spine pressed flush and panicked into the sofa. Felix releases him immediately, taking two long strides backward and clipping the sharp edge of the coffee table on his calf. Loses his footing with a curse, hitting the floor like a sack of rocks.

Felix stares at him.

Locus stares at Felix.

"God, you're such a fucking douchebag," Felix mumbles, rubbing his left hip while he rises shakily. Standing once again, with the table safely between them, those cold hands shove down into the front pockets of his jeans, causing a slouch. Body language shaped like a pout.

This can't be real. It _can't._ Locus sifts through the depths of his knowledge to figure out what sort of mental condition could cause a tactile hallucination as vivid as this one. Schizophrenia, unlikely. Though he has brushed shoulders with dark images in his past on a few occasions, the disorder would have to be chronic, and he's been fine for years. Dementia, possibly. A deterioration in his cognitive functions. But his memory has been fine, his behavior more or less steady. Simple delirium, then? But, no, the likely culprit would be alcohol withdrawal, and he hasn't exactly practiced moderation.

"You're trying to play me off as a delusion, aren't you?" Felix pipes up, pointing an accusatory finger. He pins Locus with a heavy stare. His arm drops slowly. "Yeah. Fucking predictable. I travel hundreds of light years to find your deadass stuck on some dumpster fire of a planet, _don't_ kill you—even though, and I mean I'm just being honest here, you're making yourself _very_ killable—and this is the thanks I get? Great. Just fucking _great._ "

Felix strides forward and wraps his hand around the handle of his bayonet. Locus squeezes the thin wrist that, somehow, stumbles its way beneath his fingers. Confused eyes blink at his own hand. How it curls tightly. How a knobby bone rubs into the palm of it.

He's still mulling over how and why he's reached out, maybe some long buried instinct driving him to prevent a weapon from passing into the other man's hand, when Felix jerks his hand back like Locus burned him. Unencumbered, dark fingers rest on the flat handle of the knife with no attempt to pull metal from wood, but clearly and succinctly preventing Felix from doing so.

Felix rubs his wrist, glaring pointedly.

"Fucking. Douchebag."

A moment of silence. Felix waits for him to say something. Locus doesn't know what to say. The edges of his vision blur. His stomach clenches, reminding him both of its hunger and its wooziness. There remains a table between them, and a knife embedded in its face. For all the touch, the breath, the scent of Felix in the room, Locus still has no idea how to justify a man that must, _surely,_ be an image of personal derangement. So he waits for it to dissolve.

It does not.

Felix flings his hands into the air with an exasperated groan. Paces again.

"You are the densest motherfucker in the entire universe, and I'd ask if you knew that already but, well, case in point. Whatever. _Fine._ See if I do you any more favors. I'm crashing here until my _existence_ is good and lodged in that thick fucking skull of yours, and then we're gonna have a nice long—"

"No."

Gruff, Locus clips out the word before any more noise can clatter against the corners of his living room. _I'm crashing here._ No. Hallucination or not, that isn't happening. The thought of any version of Felix—dead or alive—let loose within his home drags pointed, sickening fingers down his spine. As if the man, or the memory of him, will seep in and poison the walls, leaving behind stains from burst inkwells.

Felix stops. Turns, slowly. Arms that were previously waving around, gesturing violently to the room, creep upwards to cross over his chest again.

"No," he repeats, chewing on the word. "No? What do you mean _no,_ Loc? I'm here. You can't run away. You have to fucking deal with it."

Locus stands abruptly. Rounds the coffee table and eats up the space between them. He steps forward, and Felix gives ground, again and again until the other man leans flush into the wall, eyes wide and pupils dilated to dark black splotches ringed in amber brown. Locus refrains from touch, holds no desire to breach the inch of space between their chests, though a certain vivid rage curls between his ribs and spills into his stomach, and when he speaks his voice comes out low and emotionless and firm.

"No. _Leave._ "

For the first time Locus can remember, Felix doesn't speak.

He just does as he's told.

It must be a hallucination.

* * *

When Capella's second moon intersects beyond the first, and the white sandy shore throws back brilliant light, glimmering reflections cast up from the ocean's inky dark, Locus stumbles onto his front porch with a half-drunk bottle of rye grain vodka clutched in one trembling fist, plops down on the top step, and leans heavily against the wooden railing. He tips the glass rim against his lips, head thrown back, and watches, vision swimming, while clear liquid slides from the neck of the bottle into his mouth and down his throat.

Earlier, he had vomited the contents of last night's dinner into the toilet. Brushed his teeth. Took a shower, forehead pressed into white tile for half an hour before turning the heat off and washing his hair beneath an icy spray. Clean, dressed, and more sober than that morning, he'd walked out into his living room and stopped dead in his tracks. The bayonet, blade glinting and black handle still and lifeless, was stuck to the same spot in the coffee table.

Felix is alive.

It plagues his thoughts when he walks to town, purchasing groceries and liquor for himself and yams and corn and sweet potatoes for Galisdi.

Felix is alive.

When he stops by Auri's lab to pass along a note Geiss had asked him to give her, and she giggles after reading it in front of him, shakes her head, then tucks it into her pocket.

Felix is alive.

His errands don't take long. He gets back home just before noon, cracks into a fresh bottle of vodka, and hasn't stopped drinking since.

Two moons become four. Gravity deepens its grip and pulls him lower, until his legs spread for balance and his elbows anchor on both knees. The bottle dangles between them, held lightly in clenched fingers. While sober, the evidence of Felix's continued existence had been easier to accept. A bayonet could be pulled from the table. Its sharpness tested on the end of his finger. Blood prickled up, and Locus tasted it with his mouth and felt warmth on his tongue.

_Not_ sober is a different story. It's easier to wave away the fine details, turn his nose up at rote fact, and continue driving liquid heat into his stomach from the highway of his throat. Adversely, it's also easier to think, _who cares?_ Felix is alive. So what? The guy hasn't killed him. Tucked his tail between his legs and ran off the moment Locus showed a little opposition. What was it that freaky red alien AI had told him all those years ago? Felix is afraid of him. Maybe more afraid now than he ever was before, given all that's transpired.

_Good riddance._ Felix had been a blot in his life. Controlling, manipulative, self-serving. He'd gone mad at the end of it all. Bloodthirsty. Killing for killing's sake, with no pretense of following orders, no sense of right or wrong. It didn't matter that they'd been working that soul-sucking job for five years, and were so close to the end they could practically taste it. It didn't matter that meticulous planning and careful forethought had been thwarted by dumb luck. It didn't matter that Felix had dragged him from that gigantic pile of fallen spaceship instead of leaving him crushed and inevitably dead, as if saving Locus' life was simple instinct.

No.

Locus never liked the guy. Never trusted him. Never reminisced on easier times fondly. Never accepted gifts. Never laughed at anything Felix said, no, not even one time, absolutely not.

_Good riddance,_ he thinks again, more loudly than the last time, then tips his head back to ease a few long gulps of liquor down his throat. One, two, three, before he pulls the bottle away. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stares blearily out onto the shore. It takes him a moment to spot it. The winking, listless glow of dull red brightening, then dimming. It gets closer. Steady pace. Something about it pings in his head, rattles his memory.

_Mov._

If his feet weren't lead and his legs had any strength left to them, he would stand. Would wave. Would helplessly smile, small as it always was, in the face of her own wide grin, dark arms slung around his neck, her plush lips littering his scarred face with kisses. Instead, he waits patiently for her approach, the embering tip of her cigarette breathing slowly with each handful of steps. But it never turns to greet him at the bottom step. Passes the front of his cabin on stilts, then beyond, and it isn't until he squints in its direction, a deep ravine splintering open within his heart at the obvious rejection, that he notices pale skin and a frame far more narrow than Mov's had ever been.

Felix wanders casually down the half-moon inlet encircling Locus' home. Makes a pass from one end, to the next, then back again. The cotton filter flies from his hand into the ocean, dirtying Locus' shore. He stops, then, turns slowly to tilt his head curiously at Locus' dark form perched atop the steps leading to his home like a gargoyle protecting something sacred. Felix waits, not for very long, then shrugs, shoving his hands into his front pockets, and leaves.

Night after night.

Until, one night, Felix walks to the base of creaky wooden steps, flicks his cigarette butt into the sand by his feet, and says, "So, you gonna say hi or what?"

Locus doesn't remember saying anything at all. But the next night, Felix approaches and talks. And the next night, he leans against the railing at the bottom step and talks some more. Locus wakes up in the mornings, fuzzy headed and unsure what transpires. Only remembers those eyes hidden in the dark, fixed on him.

Only remembers the impression of eddies, and emerald light, and cold washing through him while he sinks, and sinks, and sinks.

**Author's Note:**

> Next part will be a Felix chapter. He fills in some blanks.


End file.
